Meet My Friends

Ok, I’m going in a little different direction today.
I want to take a moment and introduce you to a couple friends of mine.
They lived in Southern California.
Or, maybe New England.
I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

The first person’s name is Marc.
He’s a data analyst for a consulting company.
The company does work for some Silicon Valley companies.
They help glean data and sift it in order to find trends that their clients can exploit in order to up their ad revenue.
Marc also has training in programming.

The other person is Ann.
She is a co-worker of Marc’s.
She is a math prodigy.
Numbers speak to her like music or art speaks to other people.

Marc was raised by a single parent. His father, like so many others, ghosted his family when Marc was young. His Mom worked two jobs to support them. That left Marc with considerable time on his hands while Mom was away. To keep him busy, his Mom enrolled him in Martial Arts at an early age. This gave him a community to belong to and role models that he could follow.
He also enjoyed attending and involving himself in his local church parish. He had a fairly good relationship with the priest there. He had even considered entering the priesthood before he fell in love with computers and their potential as useful tools for life and commerce.

Ann came from an abusive home. She and her siblings were continually berated by their alcoholic mother and a father who simply didn’t seem to care. Ann, as the oldest, took the brunt of the abuse. At the same time, however, she worked hard to protect and support her younger sister and brothers.
She found escape and peace in numbers. There was beauty in the patterns that they formed. Rather than being the drudgery that most kids experienced, Ann saw purpose and order. Her mind was wired in such a way that equations and formulae became friends she could count on to always remain consistent.

These two are not real people.
They are characters in a story that I began a little over a year ago.
After I completed the original draft of the story I set it on the corner of my desk.
And, there it sits.

There are many times that I considered shredding the story. It was a valiant first attempt. But, it’s really not very good. I thought that perhaps I’d just start a new project and build upon my initial experience.

However, Marc and Ann keep coming back into my brain.
The premise of the story seems sound enough. I just need to reconsider my approach.

So, with that in mind, I thought that I would breathe some new life into this tale. I’m not sure what’s going to come of it. It may still simply crash and burn.
If I can introduce these characters, though, perhaps they, like Pinocchio, will come to life and become real people.